Sadder and no wiser: A bewildered Tyson on himself

The story of Mike Tyson's long stumble to self-destruction is at the core of "Tyson," a new documentary from James Toback.

Tyson. (R) Sony Pictures Classics (88 min.) Directed by James Toback. Now playing in New York. TWO AND A HALF STARS.

How do you beat Mike Tyson in the ring?

Bring a gun.

That was the joke you heard when the heavyweight was in his prime, and although it probably had been left over from another champion (Ali? Louis?), it had a cold kind of truth.

Tyson didn't just defeat opponents, he demolished them. He got knockouts in the first round. He boasted of driving people's noses up into their brains. He threatened -- no, really -- to eat their children.

Who could defeat someone like that?

In the end, only Mike Tyson could.

The story of his long stumble to self-destruction is at the core of "Tyson," a new documentary from James Toback, a filmmaker long fascinated with the testosterone excesses of sex and gambling, sports and drugs.

Toback has used Tyson as an amateur actor in some of his odd recent movies ("Black and White," "When Will I Be Loved.") Here, he takes him as his solo subject, setting up a camera, sitting the ex-champ down on a couch and letting him talk.

And cry. And boast. And self-examine. And, mostly, self-justify.

Toback calls his subject "a figure of staggering complexity." Actually, he's a figure of rather sad simplicity, a frightened and fatherless boy who grew up brutalized and grew to brutalize other people.

That the ring afforded him, for a while, a chance to do that legally made him his fortune, most of which he went on to throw away. Any real chance he had at redemption fell away when his early mentors -- who saw a spark in the Brooklyn delinquent -- disappeared or died.

What's doubly tragic is that Tyson still can't understand his own downfall.

He was convicted of rape in 1992 and spent three years in prison. On camera now, he angrily declares his innocence, calling his accuser "that wretched swine of a woman."

His insistence soon rings a little hollow ("I may have taken advantage of women before, but I never took advantage of her.") When he talks about women -- "I want to ravish them," "I want to dominate them sexually" -- it's in the language of aggression, not affection.

Yet Tyson still thinks he's a good guy -- more sinned against then sinning, brought down by "leeches."

By only interviewing Tyson, Toback lets him get away with it, too. Do Tyson's ex-wives have anything pertinent to add? Does Evander Holyfield, perhaps, have a differing point of view? It's a good bet -- but you won't find them here, except in old film clips.

Toback's gentleness towards Tyson is matched only by his own comfortable self-regard. This film, he informs us in a director's statement, is "a new form of presentation suggested by current radically shifting and radically impatient responses to modern life and media."

Uh-huh.

Or, in plain English, it's a grab bag of occasional split-screens and sometimes overlapping or echoing dialogue -- all of which does more to obscure than illuminate the self-deceiving subject.

There are those old fight films, though, as we see Tyson take apart one opponent after another. There is the stunning loss to Buster Douglas in 1990 when Tyson hit the canvas, and shoving his mouth guard back in, vainly tried to get to his feet.

Then there is the prison time. And the bizarre, ear-biting fight with Holyfield in 1997. And the string of improbable, embarrassing defeats ending with Tyson's in-the-ring retirement in 2005. It's a long sad slide show of a man who had everything and lost it.

The saddest thing is that this great fighter still doesn't seem to realize that he was his own, fiercest, undefeated opponent.